


no other version of me

by hauntedbytears



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: ? - Freeform, Amnesia, Angst, M/M, memory loss au, romantic subtext, spoilers but only for rebirth i think, yeah i stole the title from a random generator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28935975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hauntedbytears/pseuds/hauntedbytears
Summary: He keeps saying a name, a name you do not know and have never heard, but he keeps saying it anyway, hope in his eyes like the powerless prayer of a drowning man. And your heart seizes up in your chest....“You don’t remember me?” he asks, his voice so soft and so sad.
Relationships: Ortega/Sidestep (Fallen Hero)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	no other version of me

**Author's Note:**

> a writing warm-up in an attempt to write through a writer's block

There is a man. He is standing in front of you, and he is smiling, and there are the beginnings of tears in his eyes.

He keeps saying a name, a name you do not know and have never heard, but he keeps saying it anyway, hope in his eyes like the powerless prayer of a drowning man. And your heart seizes up in your chest. 

Caution, you suppose. Fear of this man, strikingly handsome, who seems determined to speak nonsense at you in this shitty little diner.

So you gather up the courage, and you ask “who are you?” because you can’t seem to read his mind and he doesn’t seem to be going away. And his face falls as he processes the question, and he begins to apologise, some quiet weariness settling back into the lines of his face. But then his eyes catch on the long, twisted scar running down your left hand and he just pauses. Just stops, as though someone somewhere had hit some big cosmic button, had reached into his very soul and pulled something loose. 

“You don’t remember me?” he asks, his voice so soft and so sad, and you almost want to lie just so you won’t have to keep seeing that expression on his face - that desperate, fragile hopelessness. 

“Sorry,” you say, and you can barely speak for the incomprehensible sorrow running through you. 

\-- 

The man - _Ortega_ \- knew you once, he says. Worked with you. Was friends with you. And you can barely comprehend the idea of _friendship_ , but he recognises the cuts on your hand and recalls the mangled scar running across your lower leg. And you know, logically, that lots of people - too many people - knew those things, but you find yourself accepting when he brings up meeting again, unable to shut down your own curiosity. 

Even though it hurts whenever you see him, even though some part of you seems determined to tear itself apart with fear and uncertainty every time he looks at you. Or maybe because of that - because the pain seems almost pleasant compared to the emptiness that otherwise keeps gnawing at you. 

You’ve never been cautious enough to keep yourself safe, so maybe this is just a new manifestation of that same old death wish. 

So you meet him when you have time, and you try to convince yourself that what you are doing isn’t as stupid as it seems, and you listen to stories about yourself, trying to find familiarity amongst the unfamiliar. 

You never do. You can’t imagine being the person he talks about like that. And you’re sure he’s dancing around some subjects, never quite telling the whole truth. 

You still find yourself mouthing his name sometimes, however. Between the meetings that are few and far in between, in moments when you’re not quite tuned in to the world around you, the sounds of his name feels almost familiar on your lips. 

\--

He knows the way you like your coffee, and he orders it each time before you meet up. And you think that it should chafe at you at times - that he seems to feel compelled to keep buying you stuff, but that’s not what bothers you. 

After all, you’ve searched him up. You’ve seen his generosity and his carelessness with money and all those articles talking about how kind he was. So, no, that wasn’t the thing that you kept thinking about.

It was just that - what sort of person remembered details like that after seven years? And with such easy familiarity, as though it simply hasn’t occurred to him that this might be something even slightly strange. And it would almost be creepy, you think, if not for the way that it seemed second nature to him, to know these things about the person you were - these traits that you apparently still carried with you. 

There’s a question on the tip of your tongue that you don’t ask, even though you sometimes feel like it’s killing you. You’re too afraid to know the answer, maybe, or you simply know that this is not a question you should ask. 

Another thing that is better left in the past. 

\--

The man - Ortega - is at the gala you attack, and he is readying himself to fight you. Because of course he is, because you really shouldn’t have expected otherwise. 

He seems to follow you, seems to haunt you without doing so intentionally - which may be the most insulting part, really. 

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter right now that he knew a you that once was, but no longer is. You’re angry, and you’ve just knocked out the boy with the blond locks, and you keep seeing the museum display supposedly dedicated to you on the back of your eyelids every time you blink. 

So you’re just hungry for the fight. For blood. For the familiar snap of cartilage across the bridge of your nose and the familiar rawness of bruises and scraped skin. So you charge him before he even has time to prepare, and it feels good. It feels clean. Even more so when he starts fighting back. 

And you wonder why fighting him feels so natural, why you seem to know how to trade blows with him so easily. You wonder if maybe you’d been less than friends, and maybe that was why he kept skirting around addressing the question of how well you knew each other. 

Or maybe you’d simply been made to hurt him. 

\-- 

Your hand is shaking. 

_Why is your hand shaking?_

Ortega is on the ground, looking up at you. He’s got a few broken ribs, if you’re looking at it right, and you have no reason to be stepping away. You have no reason to be keeping such an immediate threat present by leaving a formidable opponent conscious, not when it would be so easy to just knock him out like you did to Herald. 

No reason but the fact that your face is suddenly wet with incomprehensible tears behind your mask. No reason but the fact that each of your suddenly gasping breaths - turned dark and intentional by the voice modulator - feels like it’s tearing your throat bloody. 

It’s a relief when Lady Argent shows up on the scene. 

\--

You hold his hand in the hospital, even though you’d put him there, because it feels right and because you just might have hit your head too hard during that fight - or at least that’s your excuse, your reason for why some part of you seems to remember the lines of his hand - seems to remember making his lifeline your own, just for a moment. 

You should feel guilty - you do feel guilty. But not guilty enough. 

He murmurs a name - it takes you too long to recognise that it’s yours, allegedly - and he doesn’t wake up but he does squeeze your hand. And you are suddenly enthralled by the way he breathes, by the curve of his lashes and the lines of his hands. 

The thing that hurts inside you - that has been hurting inside you since you’d ran into him in that awful diner - makes itself known again, pressing down on your airways until you’re halfway weeping, biting back an urge to scream, or run, or just to do _something_.

You don’t do any of those things. You just breathe through the pain, the way that you’ve been taught to. The way that had been beaten into you. 

_Sidestep reborn,_ you think. _Sorry, stranger, but whoever you knew is gone. The Farm killed him, and I am all that remains._


End file.
